This will boot into Safe mode, which spends five minutes running Disk Utility ( Repair disk ) then boots form your regular Hard Drive with a limited set of Apple-only extensions loaded, and asks for your username and password, even if you normally auto-login.

Safe Mode runs the display in simple mode, because it does not load the display driver for accelerated operation.

You can use Safe Mode to do software update, enable and disable things, and check out your Mac.

If booting into regular mode gets you back to the same problems, one of the extensions loaded may be the problem. A common problem on older Mac Pros is the display card is no longer willing to work in accelerated mode, because it has failed.

Just as a follow up, I rebooted in Recovery mode and ran disk repair. Worked the first time, failed the second, worked the third.

Just for kicks I decided to restart the machine and see if it made any difference. It went to gray screen initially after log in, and just about when I was going to shut it down again, the desktop reappeared!

The good news is most of the files are backed up, but it's much faster to get files to my new computer via local disks vs. online restore!

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